The first Americans had pet dogs 1000 years earlier than thought

Dogs were living as companions to the early settlers of North America over 10,000 years ago.

Angela Perri of Durham University, UK and her American colleagues have re-examined the remains of three ancient dog skeletons, which had previously been excavated. Two of them, from the Koster site in a tributary of the Illinois River, were thought to be America’s oldest domesticated dogs, at around 9500 years old. The team performed fresh radiocarbon dating and found that these two dogs were even older: 10,110 …